In order to improve the quality of systematic researches, various tools have been developed by well-known scientific institutes sporadically. Dr. Nader Ale Ebrahim has collected these sporadic tools under one roof in a collection named “Research Tool Box”. The toolbox contains over 720 tools so far, classified in 4 main categories: Literature-review, Writing a paper, Targeting suitable journals, as well as Enhancing visibility and impact factor.

Wednesday, 11 November 2015

Impact of Social Sciences – 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: How researchers are getting to grip with the myriad of new tools.

There
has been a surge of new scholarly communication tools in recent years.
But how are researchers incorporating these tools into their research
workflows? Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer are conducting a global survey to investigate the choices researchers are making and why. Insights from these surveys will be valuable for libraries, research support, funders, but also for researchers themselves.

Are we witnessing a major overhaul of
scholarly communication rules and tools? In the last six months alone,
this blog has featured posts on all phases of the research cycle. From Wikipedia (discovery) to replication (analysis), Chrome extensions for reference management (writing), the Open Library of Humanities and RIO Journal (publishing), Twitter & blogging (outreach), altmetrics, R-index and Publons
(peer review and assessment). How to get on grip on the myriad of new
tools and standards? Should researchers drop everything they always took
for granted? Will switching to open tools make research workflows more
efficient? And should that be the goal anyway? Our current research may
help researchers and other stakeholders understand what is going on.

Avalanche of tools

Almost half of the tools in our database of scholarly communication tools
were created since 2013. The rate at which new tools appear to a
certain degree reflects the relative ease with which one can create
online tools. On the other hand tool creators apparently deem it
important to build a tool that supports a new way of working, or that
repairs faults and omissions in existing tools offered by the major
players (be it publishers, tech companies or venerable societies). The
push for new tools comes from funders (e.g. demanding data archiving of
Open Access) but also from researchers themselves that want to
capitalize on the possibilities of the internet in collaborating.
Especially for experimenting / collecting / mining data, writing,
journal selection, publishing and outreach we witness a surge of new
tools.

Simple model

We use a simple model to get a grip on
this abundance and variety of tools. The G-E-O model looks at whether
the tool makes science Good, Efficient or Open.
Tools that make science more open are for instance those facilitating
open access, open data, open peer review or even open drafting. Also
many outreach tools contribute to openness. For many tools that work
towards openness there are barriers such as copyright and the business
models of the big publishers. Tools that make science efficient are
mostly working on standardization (such as DOI or ORCID),
interoperability and well connected platforms. These are mostly
technical improvements and standards, that few people oppose to. Finally
you’ve got tools that go for ‘good’ science, where good mostly implies
reproducible, transparent and fair. This is about reporting,
acknowledgment, credit, assessment and quality checks. They are all part
of research governance, which is the set of rules and norms created by
(associations of) universities, societies and publishers. So far, we see
enormous amounts of efficiency tools, a fair share of openness tools
but only a handful of tools that explicitly aim for reproducible or fair
science.

Global survey

To investigate the choices researchersthemselves make in this respect, we are currently engaged in a global, multilingual survey
asking researchers across all disciplines, career stages and countries
for their tool usage for 17 research activities in their workflow. Some
5,500 researchers worldwide have responded so far, and we hope to double
that number before the survey ends in February, 2016. The survey uses
self-selected non-probability sampling. The bias issues inherent to this
approach will be addressed with targeted distribution during the
runtime of the survey and afterwards with statistical operations. Some
60 institutions across the globe have already partnered with us to
distribute the survey within their own organization using custom URLs, allowing us to share institutionally tagged data with them.

We think the survey can become one of
the largest multilingual surveys into researcher practices. Insights
from these data, which will be made public in raw, anonymised form, will
be valuable for libraries, research support, funders, but also for
researchers themselves. They also get immediate preliminary feedback
from the survey. For the six phases of the research cycle, a radar chart
shows whether someone’s tool usage is more traditional or more
innovative than the average of their peer group. The reasons for and
implications of changing tool usage are the next step of our research,
and will be the subject of follow-up in-depth studies with a subset of
respondents and with tool creators.

Workflows and interoperability

For researchers it is important to
know whether using a new tool will reduce time needed to get desired
results or even get results that were hitherto impossible to get.
Assessing this is not straightforward, because the use of tools,
platforms and websites is tied together over the entire research cycle.
Ideas, information, data, publications and assessment move through this
cycle and researchers need transitions from one tool or platform to the
other to be smooth. Interoperability of tools is key. In addition,
researchers’ actions and options are not isolated and individual, but
linked to the entire ecosystem of tools. Researchers like an efficient
workflow, but big players are also taking a workflow/ecosystem view to
developing their portfolio of tools. That is the strategic reason for
Elsevier to buy and expand Mendeley and for SpringerNature to work with
Digital Science within Holtzbrinck. Alternatively you can envision
Google and Wikimedia scholarly ecosystems.

Towards a scholarly commons?

In order for science to proceed
unhindered by (proprietary) company ecosystems or the idiosyncrasies of
individual researcher workflows, it is increasingly important that we
define a set of protocols, principles, API’s, formats and ID’s to enable
any kind of research object to move freely between researchers wanting
to add, reuse, comment, and any action and actor to be defined and
easily referenced. It is good to know that Force11, the network of forward thinking people in scholarly communication, will organise a number of workshops next year to imagine what exactly is needed for a future with ascholarly commons.

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the
position of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School
of Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.

About the Authors

Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer
work at Utrecht University Library, as geosciences librarian and
librarian for biomedical sciences, respectively. They are charting the
changing landscape of scholarly communication in their project ‘Innovations in Scholarly Communication’ and are members of the steering group of the Force11 Scholarly Commons initiative. They can be found on Twitter as @jeroenbosman and @MsPhelps.

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About Me

Nader Ale Ebrahim has
a Technology Management PhD degree from the Department of Engineering
Design and Manufacture, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya
(UM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He holds a Master of Science in the
mechanical engineering from University of Tehran, Iran.